Martin Scorsese takes the measure of the big streaming platforms

Martin Scorsese, speaking in January after a screening of 'The Irishman' at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.Michael Tullberg / Getty Images

He will be 77 years old, but he moves like a fish in water - better than much younger filmmakers - in the seas of digital platforms. The production companies of the new Internet era are looking for names that give them prestige and Martin Scorsese brings that and quality products (Woody Allen was with Amazon, but that contract ended really badly). A few hours after it was confirmed that Scorsese was resuming filming Killers of the Flower Moon, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, who had been paralyzed in March by the pandemic, and that it will start again in February 2021 , Sikelia Productions, the New York-owned production company, announced an ambitious agreement with Apple TV + for product development, including a first-look agreement, with what the platform would become the first window in which Scorsese will show his projects.

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Until now, Sikelia Productions had Paramount as its major (big studio) of reference, and they released The Wolf of Wall Street, Hugo's Invention, Silence or documentaries like Shine a Light. But they weren't able to - or didn't want to - cover the budget for The Irishman, and Netflix came in as a producer on Scorsese's latest gangster movie. Paramount continues as the studio that will release Killers of the Flower Moon, although the large part of the budget and the reference company for this film is Apple TV +. And it is a lot of money: several specialized publications speak of 200 million dollars, since this adaptation of the screenwriter Eric Roth of the homonymous novel by David Grann (author of Z, the lost city, also made into a movie) is a western that is developed in the 20s of the last century. In Spain it was titled Los Asesinos de la Luna (Random House Literature), and it tells of the massacre suffered in Oklahoma by the Osage Indian community, whom the oil in their properties had turned into millionaires. Little by little they began to be assassinated or die in strange circumstances, and even those who investigated the crimes began to die. When the dead reached 24, the newly founded FBI decided to intervene, reaping a resounding failure. DiCaprio will play Ernest Buckhart, one of those implicated in the deaths, the husband of an Osage Indian whose three sisters were murdered; and De Niro, to William Hale, a former Texas commander whom the FBI turned to when the first investigation failed.

With this agreement, Scorsese has found a long-term partner for his projects, and Apple TV + benefits from premiering his fiction films and documentaries, such as - they are in post-production - An Afternoon with SCTV, another about Fran Lebowitz (author at the which Public Speaking has already dedicated ) and a third on David Johansen, leader of the New York Dolls group. As he did with Netflix, Scorsese will first defend the theatrical release and then take his works to the Apple platform, but those times are shortening, after agreements such as Universal and the AMC Theaters chain, the main one in the US, which allows to the studio to release his films on platforms just three weeks after their theatrical release.

The economic power of the Internet

The same night that Scorsese's production company deal with Apple TV + (which is said to be several years old, without giving a figure) was made public, the list of the highest paid actors according to 'Forbes' was published. It's not just directors who benefit from digital platforms, but performers too: the top three - Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Mark Wahlberg - have benefited primarily from their Netflix movie pay.